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| Courtesy of Salon.com |
The first sentence read, “I get Geigered—to measure my personal level of radioactivity— before I enter the Merry Widow Health Mine. “ Now, I only remember bits and pieces of chemistry, but I am pretty sure that a Geiger counter isn’t used on people everyday. So while I usually would have little interest in a story about radon gas, this intrigued me and I continued to read.
This is a case study of that piece.
The Writer
Andrew C. Gottlieb is a poet and essayist who is currently the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments. Previously, he taught composition and short story writing at Iowa State University and at the University of Washington, and was writer-in-residence at Isle Royale National Park, the Montana Artists Refuge, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
His writing has appeared in literary journals and online publications including the American Literary Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Poets & Writers, Sugar House Review, and Salon.com, among others. His book of poems, Halflives, was published in 2005.
The Story
While Gottlieb was the writer-in-residence at the Montana Artists Refuge he would often take off in his car to drive around the town of Basin, Montana and look at the local sights. It provided him with something to do during his breaks from trying to finish his novel.
He had taken an interest in writing about small ghost-town communities and Basin fit the bill, so it also gave him so good inspiration for other poems and essays he would work on.
The town had been a thriving mining community in the late 19th through the mid- 20th century, but is now a little sleepier after most of the mines were shut down due to mining-waste problems. Most mines are now classified as Superfund sites by the EPA, which means that the agency is attempting to clean them up as the run-off from these mines may be cancerous.
Yet amidst these dangerous sites, and often right next door, Gottlieb discovered the health mines. The health mines are old shafts that are now open, at an entrance fee, to suffering people who sit in them for a few hours each in day to ease their pain by exposing themselves to radon gas. People suffering everything from arthritis to Parkinson’s to emphysema and depression, and especially older people come from all over the country to take the chance that the mines will relieve their pain.
When learning of this practice, Gottlieb’s first thought was, “This is so weird. How come no one has written about this?” He quickly realized that if he didn’t take action and be the person to write about the health mines, then he would surely miss out on a great story.
“The stuff you want to write about, you just feel it in your gut,” Gottlieb said. “And you always hope that there is money and circumstance to help you do that.”
Writing the Story
When Gottlieb first spent an hour sitting in the health mine, he did not do so with the intention of writing this essay. Instead he entered the mine out of curiosity and with an open state of mind for what he might find. The more he participated and interacted with the people in the mine, the weirder it got and that is when he knew he had a good story on his hands.
In general, because Gottlieb is an essayist and not a journalist, he tends not to tell people that he is going to write about them. The people he talks to are not his sources, they are characters in his story and he finds that when he doesn’t say he is a writer he gets to see people behave naturally and then he also gets to exist as part of the experience.
In this particular case, Gottlieb sat in the mines for an hour and spoke with the health mine regulars. He then went into town and spoke to some others who were local to the area.
What he found was an overwhelming skepticism of the EPA and their attempt to cleanup the area among the locals. In fact, despite mines being closed down next to the health mines, the locals still seems to believe that the health mines are not bad for them.
So Gottlieb found himself confronted with a town where on one side there are mine sites that might be giving people cancer, and right next door people are using radon gas to cure their ails. His response: “god bless the gratuitous irony.”
After sitting in the mines and interviewing some locals, Gottlieb went back to his apartment and began to write. He wrote not only about the health mines, but also about his entire Montana experience. He approached the essay as a memoir, not claiming any knowledge of the science behind radon gas as a pain reliever, which gave him freedom in the narrative.
The final product of that was a 10,000-word essay on radon gas and mining in Montana.
Publishing
Getting published can be difficult without an agent, Gottlieb tells me, but essays are often easier to get printed than poems, so he was optimistic about this piece.
He sent his 10,000-word essay out to a number of literary journals, but did not receive any response. After some time, he realized that the piece was too long and would be better off as two essays.
Gottlieb then sent an edited 5,000-word essay about radon gas and the health mines to over 20 journals. There was good feedback from editors, but no luck in getting it published.
And then the essay was picked up by the Bellevue Literary Review, which is published by the NYU Langone Medical Center and publishes works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that touch upon relationships to the human body, illness, health and healing.
The editorial team at Bellevue spent a lot of time editing the piece. Some of the comments were surrounding content, but there were also disagreements about word placement and word choice. Gottlieb said that they went back and forth on many items, but tried to choose his battles and was happy with the outcome.
The essay, title “Radon Gas and the Believers” appeared in the 10th anniversary edition of the Bellevue Literary Review earlier this year.
The Aftermath
Then two weeks ago, Gottlieb was copied on an email between his Bellevue editor and a Salon.com editor who had read his story and was interested in republishing it. This thrilled Gottlieb.
“It’s really a lot of pure luck,” he said. “I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of the piece.”
Salon moved quickly to get the essay published and it was on the site by October 26th with the new title “Why I Made Myself Radioactive.”
Gottlieb notes that the title was changed without asking him, and while he finds it catchy, he is not sure that it accurately describes what the essay ultimately delivers. The new title turns the whole piece on him, instead of making it about the people in the health mines and the irony of the situation.
He believes that this change in title may have contributed, in some part, to criticism that the essay received on the site. The comments were an eye-opener:
“Salon, shame on you for publishing this without a disclaimer that it is promoting a dangerous quack practice that has no proven benefits. Ugh. Why can't any news site afford a medical fact-checker? (I'm available if interested...)” - estrong1
And the comments just got more rude and outrageous from there.
“When you put people in a car on a highway, it’s the same way that people get when they are posting online,” Gottlieb said.
It seems that many Salon readers had misread the essay, taking it as a piece of medical journalism as opposed to the memoir or slice of life that it was meant to be. At the same time, Gottlieb doesn’t blame them for misreading the article, as Salon does not usually publish essays like his and readers may have gone into the piece with false expectations accordingly.
In the end, Gottlieb is still very proud of his essay and doesn’t let the criticism get him down.
“It never gets better,” he said. “There are always people who won’t like what you write, but you enjoy it for what you do.”
Andrew Gottlieb’s story can be read at here.
For more information on the author, please visit his website.
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